Google Fitbit’s big week demonstra— seriously, where is the dark theme

Abner Li | Mar 22 2024 - 1:30 pm PT

Fitbit has had a number of back-to-back announcements and changes in recent weeks. I don’t think it was particularly planned to be that away, but the flurry of activity is more promising than not. It starts with a “Google Fitbit” name that cements how the brand is firmly a part of Google, just like “Google Nest.” If Google Fitbit was always the plan, they should have really done that from the start instead of picking a “Fitbit by Google” stopgap that was shown to people for sometime on product packaging and marketing.

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I’m personally curious whether the Fitbit logo, which consists of dots arranged to form an arrow, survives, or whether the Google “G” will be used going forward, again like Pixel and Nest. I’d argue that keeping the logo around helps differentiate and distinguish Made by Google’s different form factors.

Meanwhile, the Google Store finally started selling Fitbit accessories after previously just offering smartwatches and trackers. It paves the way for the fitbit.com storefront to go away in a straightforward consolidation.

On the product side, Fitbit for Android is rolling out the ability to see stats from other services via Health Connect. It’s not as source agnostic as Google Fit, but this integration is the surest sign that the Fit app is not long for this world. That’s on top of the lack of new features or a Material You overhaul in recent years. One thing Fitbit should consider taking Fit is the “Browse” tab, one of the service’s last major additions. It’s very straightforward and would be interesting as a dedicated tab in Fitbit. The upcoming Health Connect solution is just putting that in the You tab.

Meanwhile, Fitbit showed a redesign of the Sleep stats page. Last fall’s big revamp updated most of the metrics under “Activity,” but everything else is still using the older design language for a somewhat jarring mismatch. Similarly, there’s a look at an updated Health Metrics design, though my big hope here is that it’s finally native. The current version is sluggish and slow to navigate.

The biggest announcement was an update on Fitbit Labs earlier this week. Notably previewed alongside the Pixel Watch 2, there’s unfortunately no precise date beyond coming “later this year.” In October, Fitbit said it was coming “early next year” and that Pixel phone owners would get “priority access.”

Anyways, Fitbit said it wants us to “imagine a future where you have access to an on-demand personal coach that can provide you with daily guidance.” One of the features in Fitbit Labs — finally branding unclear, but would it just be called Gemini inside the Fitbit app? — will let you ask questions about your data in a conversational manner to get back patterns, correlations, and generated graphs.

Personally, I think I’d react more positively to notifications that had at least a veneer of personalization versus the very generic “reminder to walk” prompts. In fact, Fitbit is testing something called “Walkmate.”

Fitbit’s upcoming feature roadmap ranges from the advanced to the basic. One of the basic things that I want is a dark theme because opening the app shortly after you’ve woken but are still in bed to see sleep stats is jarring. Fitbit in mid-October said this was coming. I really do wish this basic user experience — every app at this stage has a dark theme — was prioritized more.

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Top comment by Lee Woods

Liked by 8 people

I wonder what is the hesitation within the Google Fitbit Team to offer a dark mode toggle for the users that want it?

It's been requested for years on their user feedback forum, even before the Google acquisition.

The generative AI for health & fitness coaching seems really intriguing and if it comes out soon enough it could set it apart from other fitness tracking platforms although I think Whoop offers something through CHAT-GPT but I never hear anything about it.

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